Soul-Body Interaction, Believed to Occur either by a Physical Inflow, or by a Spiritual Inflow, or by a Preestablished Harmony.

§§1–2 / [Author’s Introduction]

1. §3 / There are two worlds: a spiritual world where spirits and angels live, and an earthly world where we live.

2. §4 / The spiritual world came into being and is kept in existence from its sun, and the earthly world, from its sun.

3. §5 / The sun of the spiritual world is pure love from Jehovah God,

who is at its center.

4. §6 / Warmth and light emanates from that sun; the essence of that emanating warmth is love, and the essence of the emanating light is wisdom.

5. §7 / Both spiritual warmth and spiritual light fl ow into us. The warmth fl ows into our will and gives rise there to a love for doing what is good, and the light flows into our understanding and gives rise there to the truth that leads to wisdom.

6. §8 / These two—spiritual warmth and spiritual light, or love and wisdom—fl ow together from God into the human soul, flow through our soul into our mind and its feelings and thoughts, and flow from there into our physical senses, speech, and actions.

7. §9 / The sun of our earthly world is nothing but fire, and is the means by which this earthly world came into being and is kept in existence.

8. §10 / This means that everything that emanates from the physical sun is in and of itself dead.

9. §11 / What is spiritual wears what is physical the way we wear clothes.

10. §12 / It is spiritual elements clothed in this way that enable us to live as rational and moral beings—that is, to live spiritually on this earthly level.

11. §13 / How receptive we are to this infl ow depends on the state of love and wisdom within us.

12. §14 / Our understanding can be lifted into the light (that is, the wisdom) that angels enjoy to the extent that our rational ability has been cultivated; and our will can be elevated into the warmth, or love, of heaven, depending on how we live our lives. However, the love in our will becomes elevated only to the extent that we will and do what the wisdom in our understanding teaches us.

13. §15 / It is totally diff erent for animals.

14. §16 / Unknown until now, there are three levels in the spiritual world and three in this earthly world, and these shape the way all infl ow happens.

15. §17 / Purposes are on the fi rst level, means on the second, and results on the third.

16. §18 / This shows us the nature of spiritual infl ow, from its origin to its results.

§§19–20 / [Concluding Accounts]

15. 13 It is totally different for animals.

PEOPLE who base their judgments solely on the way things seem to their physical senses wind up believing that animals have a will and an understanding just the way we do, so that the only difference is that we can talk and therefore articulate the things we are thinking and desiring while animals can only make noises about them. Animals, though, do not have a will and an understanding. All they have is something that parallels these abilities, something scholars call “analogs.”

[2] The reason we are human is that our understanding can be raised above the desires of our will, can then see and identify them from a higher perspective, and can even regulate them. Animals are animals because their desires impel them to do what they do. This means that we are human because our will is subject to our understanding, while animals are animals because their understanding is subject to their will. This leads to the conclusion that our understanding is alive and is therefore truly an understanding, since it receives the inflowing light from heaven, takes hold of it and feels it to be its own, and uses it to think analytically in all kinds of ways with every appearance of independence; our will, since it receives heaven’s inflowing love and acts on it in apparent independence, is alive and is truly a will. This is not the case with animals.

[3] As a result, people who base their thinking on the lusts of their will are compared to animals and in the spiritual world even look like animals from a distance. They act like animals as well, with the sole difference that they could act differently if they wanted to. People who control the lusts of their will by means of their understanding, though, and therefore behave rationally and wisely, look human in the spiritual world, and are angels of heaven.

[4] In short, the will and the understanding in animals are always inseparable; and since the will is by nature blind, being attuned to warmth and not light, it blinds their understanding as well. So animals do not know or comprehend what they are doing. Still, they do act; but their doing so is the result of an inflow from the spiritual world. This kind of behavior is instinctive.

[5] Some people believe that animals’ actions are the result of thoughts they have in their understanding, but there is no truth whatever in this. They are impelled to action simply by an earthly love that is in them by creation, supported by their physical senses. The only reason we humans are able to think and talk is that our understanding can be separated from our will and raised up into the light of heaven, since it is our understanding that thinks and our thinking that speaks.

[6] Animals behave according to laws of the design written on their nature, and some of them, unlike many people, seem to behave morally and rationally. This is because their understanding is blindly obedient to their will, so they have not been able to corrupt it by perverted rationalizations the way we have.

Please note, however, that in the preceding discussion the “will” and “understanding” of animals actually means the likeness and analog of these faculties in them. The analogs are given these names because of how they seem.

[7] We may compare the life of animals to that of sleepwalkers, who walk around and do things on the basis of their will while their understanding is dormant. Or it is like blind people who are led along the road by a dog, or like cognitively impaired people who perform their work according to standards by sheer habit formed through repetition. Or we might compare the life of animals to that of people who suffer from amnesia and have lost their ability to function mentally as a result: they still know, or can learn, how to clothe themselves, eat good food, make love, leave home on a walk and find their way back again, driven by what they want and what feels good, despite the fact that they have no thoughts and therefore cannot talk.

[8] This shows how deluded people are if they believe that animals enjoy rationality and differ from humans only in outer shape and in their inability to articulate the rational processes hidden within them. These illusions lead many to conclude that if we live after death, so do animals, or conversely that if animals do not live after death, neither do we. These and many other fictions are the result of not knowing about the will and the understanding, or about the levels by which our minds, so to speak, climb the ladder to heaven.